Perhaps A Strange Question... Seeking The Wisdom Others Have To Share

[Catherine Therese]

This may seem strange from someone with theology quals and a history involving a period of religious life... but I just don't have the life experience to work through the question on my mind in any way other than theoretically. I'm hoping that when I ask my somewhat simplistic question, some of you have wisdom to offer. 

 

I am trying to be open to options other than some form of consecrated life, and to really consider them carefully. If the Lord calls one out of religious life and back to the world, then surely she owes Him a legitimate effort at being open to all the good that lay life holds? 

 

So I've been thinking and starting to pray about whether or not I should reconsider openness to married life. 

 

BUT....

 

Apart from the fact that I don't get out much, and that full time work + full time study is rather isolating and hardly going to create opportunities to meet men, there is also the fact that... well, I don't feel a particularly significant desire to have kids. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE kids, and I love to spend time with my nieces and nephews, and occasionally mind friends' kids so they can have a break, and that sort of thing. I DO have a deep desire to guide and to mould and to be a spiritual mother... (i.e. I'm a perfectly normal young woman with nurturing tendencies) but the idea of my own kids is daunting rather than desirable... and this seems like an odd reaction from the eldest child of a large family who really does, as I said before, love kids. 

 

Is this incidental? 
Or is this telling me something? 

 

Is it just a readiness thing? 

I AM approaching my mid-30s pretty quick... how long does it take for a person to be ready, for goodness' sake? 

 

Or perhaps its a function of no-one REALLY being ready until the 'right' man comes along with whom to take this path together?

 

[maximillion]

Hmmmm. Interesting.

 

I can only speak from my own experience of course.

 

I was never that attracted to having children..............when I came out of the convent, having made Vows for life, I still wanted to keep myself for the Lord only, and I was ticking on in years too. I didn't feel a call to married life, but I did start to have big maternal feelings.

 

So I prayed about all of this and a few days later was visiting a social worker friend and saw an add in the waiting room for temporary foster parents. Yes!

God is SO wonderful, He even found a way for me to be a parent.

 

There are so many permutations and lifestyles, I am praying you are able to place your hand confidently in His and know which way to go........

[domenica_therese]

I hardly have the life experience to answer this, but something struck me reading this that I thought I'd share.

 

I was never really attracted to dating in highschool, partly because I saw a lot of it being done stupidly and had no desire to be stupid. When I was first making vocation visits and talking to vocation directresses, sometimes they would seem surprised that married life wasn't really a desire for me and never had been, and I'd never dated. One kind of looked at me quizzically and asked me if that bothered me. At the time I was a little indignant about that, and she and I never really "hit it off" well. 

 

Then, out of the blue, this past semester, after I was already accepted, dating seemed like a legitimate possibility for the first time. I realized there actually were (shocker!) guys out there in the universe who might ask me on a date (if it weren't universally known at my University that I was joining a convent), and that I might actually enjoy that if that were to happen. 

 

I was very confused by this, since I had really had no serious inclination towards dating anyone before in my life. I talked to my spiritual director about it, and the whole session kind of took on the hue of a conversation about the re-unification of my person. How there were all these things I thought I wasn't, and I really was, and a religious vocation requires wholeness of person. So it was only natural that parts of me that I'd sat on in highschool out of fear of being rejected or irrational needed to be confronted and reintegrated.

 

So I guess it might be beneficial to pray about why the idea of having kids is daunting. Maybe married life has to become a legitimate possibility before you can give it fully to the Lord and choose another path? Because we are never called to a vocation out of a lack. It is not that one is called to be a Franciscan because one is not smart enough to be a Dominican, or to be a Dominican because one is not compassionate enough to be a Franciscan, because both are called to be both. One can be called to be a Franciscan because of the deep well of compassion they possess without their calling expressing a lack of "enough" on their part in other categories. Similarly, I think there is a delicate balance between acknowledging that if one is not called to be a mother, one has not been given the grace to be a mother, and going to a religious vocation because one is not "enough" to be a mother, or vice versa. Because a lot of times when we see ourselves as not enough, we are not saying that "God has not given me enough grace at the present moment to be enough" but that "I am inherently" not enough. Although we come in different flavors, all of us are called to be fully virtuous, and a lot of things that get thought of as character traits (patience, compassion, generosity) are things we are all called to cultivate and be.

 

I do not feel called to motherhood, but there are moments where baby Tylenol commercials come on TV, and I think "I want that." But it isn't vocational, it's a selfish want, a want to have a child all mine, as opposed to spiritual motherhood where all my dear little students are ultimately very far beyond my control, out in the fracas of other homes. But the call to be a mother isn't a call to have children who are yours, but to raise children who are God's, so I would have just the same trouble surrendering were I to be a mother.

But as much as I don't feel called to that vocation, I'm not daunted by it. 

 

God leads by peace. :)